Researchers earn $442,500 at Pwn2Own 2015

A two-day hacking competition called, Pwn2Own, ended on Thursday with participating researchers earning a total of $442,500 and other prizes.

According to the HP Security Research Blog, researchers uncovered five bugs in the Windows operating system and four vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 11. Competitors also found 12 bugs in Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Apple Safari and Google Chrome.

On day two, researcher Jung Hoon Lee, also known as lokihardt, won the single biggest payout in the competition’s history.

“[Lee earned] $75,000 USD for the Chrome bug, an extra $25,000 for the privilege escalation to SYSTEM, and another $10,000 from Google for hitting the beta version for a grand total of $110,000,” the blog post said. “To put it another way, lokihardt earned roughly $916 a second for his two-minute demonstration.There are times when ‘Wow’ just isn’t enough.”